Season 7 of Black Mirror closes with Eulogy, a meditation on memory, grief, and the stubborn ways we rewrite our pasts to protect ourselves. After the bold, surreal detours of earlier episodes, Eulogy dials the volume down to a whisper. It’s an elegy in every sense, anchored by a quietly astonishing performance from Paul Giamatti as Phillip, a man haunted not by what he forgot—but by what he refused to remember.
We begin with a death. Phillip learns that his ex-girlfriend Carol has passed away. He hasn’t seen or thought of her in decades, but a tech company called Eulogy contacts him. They’re building a memorial and would like his contributions—specifically, through a new technology that allows users to physically enter photographs and explore the memories they contain.
Initially reluctant, Phillip agrees. The tech arrives at his door, along with The Guide, a calm, almost apologetic handler played with eerie delicacy by Patsy Ferran. She walks Phillip through the process: enter a photo, move through the space, recall Carol. Sounds simple. Except nothing about memory ever is.
The first images he selects are, tellingly, ones where Carol’s face is absent. He shrugs it off—wrong angle, accidental blurs. But as The Guide gently presses, the truth comes out. Phillip didn’t lose those photos. He destroyed them. In each and every picture where Carol’s face appeared, he scribbled her out. Burned her out. Tore her out. He also erased any handwriting she ever gave him. It’s the most Black Mirror twist possible: not a technological failure, but a deeply human one.
What follows is a journey not through nostalgia, but reckoning. The memories he does allow himself to revisit reveal a complicated, sometimes painful relationship. Both Phillip and Carol were unfaithful. At one point, Carol moved to London to play cello in a West End production. In a moment of misguided romantic bravado, Phillip flew out to propose to her. But when he opened the ring box, she left without a word.
Then comes the gut-punch: The Guide is revealed to be a digital version of Carol’s daughter. Not a proxy. Not a host. Her actual daughter, conceived during Carol’s brief attempt to hurt Phillip in kind. The child from that one-night stand. The daughter Phillip never knew existed.
It recontextualises everything. And it cracks something open in Phillip.
He discovers an undeveloped disposable camera from that fateful London trip. It holds only one photo: a trashed hotel room, a snapshot of his rage after the failed proposal. But within the chaos of the picture, he spots something—an unopened letter from Carol, lying on the floor. He rushes to his desk and finds it, still sealed.
The letter is heartbreaking. Carol writes with raw vulnerability: she’s missed her period, she had a one-night stand, she thinks she might be pregnant. But she wants Phillip to know, to be part of the child’s life, to meet her at the back entrance to the theatre. She understands if he can’t. But she asks.
And he never showed. Because he never read the letter.
It’s here that Giamatti is at his best, folding in on himself with quiet devastation. This isn’t performative grief. It’s the horror of realising that the story he told himself for decades—that Carol left him, that she vanished—was a lie built on his own inaction.
In one final act of grace, Phillip plays a recording of her cello performance. And something shifts. He finally remembers her face. Not blurred or scratched or erased. Just Carol. As she was.
He travels to London to attend her funeral. Carol’s daughter is there, playing cello at the service. No words are exchanged. None are needed. It’s not reconciliation. But it is remembrance.
Eulogy is a quietly devastating instalment for the season. It eschews spectacle, high-tech dystopia, or genre fireworks in favour of something deeply human. It takes the conceit of memory as malleable and flips it: What if the problem isn’t faulty storage? What if it’s deliberate erasure? What if our worst edits are the ones we made on purpose?
Paul Giamatti is exquisite. He makes Phillip small, selfish, proud, and then finally, breakably open. Patsy Ferran is perfect as The Guide, bringing a mix of curiosity, detachment, and finally, quiet judgment. Their dynamic is less mentor-mentee and more like a trial in slow motion.
In the end, Eulogy doesn’t deliver redemption. It doesn’t offer catharsis. It just allows one man to finally remember what he lost. And in that act, it suggests that grief is only cruel when it goes unacknowledged. Memory, like music, needs to be played to be heard.
There are no mind-blowing twists. No technological doomsday. Just a man, a letter, and a song.
Black Mirror began as a warning. With Eulogy, it ends (for now) as a whisper.
Remember her face. That might be enough.
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